The UTEC Campus official site of the most important Digital Manufacturing Festival in Latin America

This year’s official site of the Fab Lat Fest, the most important Digital Manufacturing Festival in Latin America, is the campus of Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología (UTEC), located in the district of Barranco, Lima, Peru.   The convention, which congregated the Fab Lab networks from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, Ecuador and Peru, was held over a three-day period with the support of the Fab Foundation – CBA MIT del Massachussetts Institute of Technology y UTEC.

This major event drew multitudes of people and institutions committed to technological and social development and offered a variety of workshop seeking to stimulate the creative use of technology and to exhibit the tools currently used in the world of digital manufacturing. 

Among the activities were digital manufacturing project and prototype exhibits, lectures about the relationship of this field with education, business and its impact on society. In addition there were seminars about CNC assembly mechanisms,  I+P+P (Input – Process – Product) innovation methods and their application in the “Living Engineering” program that forms part of the UTEC academic program; a Fab Kids Club workshop; and a 3D Printing Workshop, among other activities. 

In addition, the meeting included researchers of the latest innovations in synthetic biology and their implication for the Red Fab Lab and the community in general.   The closing event involved a regional conference where the Fab Labs from all over Latin American shared their projects, experiences, achievements and views in their respective fields of application.

What is a Fab Lab?

A Fab Lab (an acronym for Fabrication Laboratory) is a space dedicated to the production of physical objects on a personalized or local scale that assembles computer-controlled machines.  It deals with spaces involved in experimentation in the field of production integrated with the local contexts in which they are located.  As such, there is a high level of diversity among objectives, projects, and accomplishments, business models and local connections according to each individual Fab Lab.  Digital manufacturing laboratories pave the way for personal manufacturing and customized production, which prompts the relocation of production to a medium or individualized scale. Socially it enables people to appropriate production methods and solve real problems from daily life or simply produce something that does not exist or that they want to make.